I have to confess that technical discussion of scales generally causes me to glaze over and nod.....errr where was I?But I did have a look at that wiki on bebop scales, cos I quite like bebop!So they seem to my resistant understanding be ordinary scales but with an extra semitone note bunged in somewhere, so that you can start each bar on the root note as you slither up and down?

As a warm-up yesterday, I just played a load of major and minor scales, each with a bonus semitone , moving up one finger at a time on each string.That certainly kept me awake!Now that's probably a proper bebob jazz exercise, I probably should have learned about 8 new scale names and probably should have learned which chords they went with.

But life's too short. I went on and dug out some nice tunes from Donegal that I learnt last year and had forgotten. "Fermoy Lasses" and "The Ewe with one Horn".

This time it's the first glissando exercise from the Ricci on Glissando book. In addition to the F Major scale on the E string, I'm also working on the other strings, transposing as appropriate.

I modified the approach a bit to be more compatible with the half-way instrument support method advocated by Julie Lyon Lieberman - half the weight on the hand, half supported by the chin resting on the chinrest. Ricci is an advocate of supporting the instrument on the hand, with the butt of the violin against the chest I think. Anyway, it'll be interesting to see where this modified method leads.

I did get back on the Bach train at least. Cello Suite No. 2 Prelude for viola, and Invention No. 2 from the "Play Along with Bach book by Barry Galbraith.

I finally unboxed my Keith McMillen 12-Step foot pedal and connected it to my iPad to play drone notes. When the music, say, shifts to an F# minor tonality, I just step on the F# pedal and now I have a pitch I can play against in my practice. It's such a huge help for practicing the Bach stuff.

I mostly practice the melody to Mr. PC, until I'm satisfied with the execution of the melody - for the day, then I start improvising simple melodic ideas.

There will always be room for improvement in how I play the melody as far as tone, timing, etc. goes, but if I wait until perfection, they'll be picking up my corpse - dead from old age - still holding the violin. Eventually I want to record a jam, like I did on guitar.

Yikes! ...makes me feel better about not doing much practicing these days either. My excuse is that I've been doing so much busking, even going back out in the evenings, I don't have the time or the energy.

So...I decided to work on something while busking, which is making high jumps from the 1st position to around the fourth, or somewhere up there.

I got a tip from another forum to 'hear' the note that you want to hit in your head just before you make the Leap of Faith. This has worked very well for me. I've got 5 or so busking tunes where I can make a jump like this, and I'm nailing the note 88% to 94% of the time (rough estimate )

I'm still doing the Flesch left hand exercises that Graham recommended. They do seem to help.Been leaning to play some basic guitar this year. May help a bit in my understanding of all the chord + scale discussions!